Affordable Health Care for All Americans: A Matter of Literacy?

On Friday, a new report released by the University of Connecticut stated that the cost of low health literacy -- or the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information -- to the United States economy totals anywhere from $106 billion to $236 billion annually. The report has experts discussing if improving health literacy is the real solution to providing affordable health care coverage for the nation's 47 million uninsured people.

According to the U.S. Department of Education's 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), which contained a health literacy component for the first time, 36 percent of the adult U.S. population , or approximately 87 million people, has just either a Basic or Below Basic health literacy level.

The new health literacy report was supported by a research grant from Pfizer.

Some medical experts are now asserting that the failure to provide or support a public policy educating Americans into a more than Basic health literacy level is bringing about needlessly high costs in terms of individual health, healthcare spending, and the economic well-being of the nation as a whole.

"Our findings suggest that low health literacy exacts enormous costs on both the health system and society, and that current expenditures could be far better directed through a commitment to improving health literacy," said John A. Vernon, PhD, Department of Finance, University of Connecticut, and lead author of the new report.

"Providing the U.S. population with access to affordable coverage creates a more level playing field among those who are and are not health literate. It is particularly challenging to improve literacy among populations who lack affordable access to timely and appropriate health care," says Sara Rosenbaum, JD, The Harold and Jane Hirsh Professor of Health Law and Policy and Chair of the Department of Health Policy at the
George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services.

Some researchers including health care providers, insurance agents, and economists have been saying for several years that the great problems with American health care are those that to many seem counterintuitive at first: a lack of incentives for competition and needs to prove themselves as top practitioners among American health care providers, and a concurrent demand among the American public to desire many "high tech" or expensive drug-based "fixes" to their ills when these are unnecessary or are the result of failing to obey the old adage, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

A lack of sufficient health care literacy would logically lead to many millions of people relying on doctors to tell them when they need to seek treatment for an advanced or advancing illness or condition when they could have recognized or known how to take healthier steps to preventing those conditions early on, thereby saving enormous amounts of money on drugs or complex procedures or needing to pay multiple doctors to give them "second opinions".

Some of these researchers have pointed to the obesity epidemic among Americans as an example of this too-often poor health literacy level.

Dartmouth statistician Jack Wennenberg has documented large differences in rates of medical procedures across different regions of the nation and demonstrated that those with the procedure-intensive medical care techniques in high demand yield no better outcomes than the those regions where people rely on fewer medical procedures.

"An individual's health literacy skills have a profound impact on his or her ability to manage a chronic illness, such as diabetes or high blood pressure. If an individual understands and can act upon medical instructions, unnecessary emergency department visits and hospitalizations can be reduced, which in turn lowers overall healthcare costs," says Barbara DeBuono, MD, MPH, Executive Director, Public Health and Government,
Pfizer Inc.

Source:
University of Connecticut (PR Newswire), "New Report Estimates Cost of Low Health Literacy Between $106 - $236 Billion Annually"